RHC Factory Part Four
Flying The Helicopters
The back of the Robinson Factory faces the runway at the airport. This picture is looking at the runway side of the new building. You can see the old building in the distance on the left side of the picture. The helicopters in the distance in the left of the picture are in the area where helicopters are run up and their rotor blades dynamically tested.
These helicopters are being flown by other students from the same safety course that I attended. People are practicing autorotations in these pictures.
Autorotation is a technique for gliding the helicopter should the engine ever quit. Most people assume the helicopter will fall out of the sky, but they don’t as long as the pilot properly performs an autorotation. The reason the helicopter nose is up in these two pictures is that the pilot is performing a flare. The flare reduces the descent rate and forward speed of the helicopter. If the pilot does it properly the helicopter comes to a stop just above the ground and will land as soft as a feather. They are loads of fun to practice, and very satisfying when you land in exactly the area you intended with a nice soft landing. They are not that hard – we teach our student pilots how to do it before we let them fly solo.
The same helicopter hovering in to the ramp, with a couple of R22s in the background practicing hovering autorotations.
